Household consumable items need frequent restocking. Consumers have to constantly keep track of the quantities of consumable items (e.g., milk, eggs, flour, toilet paper, shampoo, diapers, canned goods, etc.) throughout the duration between regular shopping trips, which is mentally taxing for most people. Sometimes, if an item is depleted before the consumer's next shopping trip, the consumer may have to make an extra trip to the store to purchase the item especially. Keeping adequate and non-excessive stock of household consumable items is a challenging and difficult chore for many people.
As smart devices and online commerce become more and more prevalent, some software vendors have developed software applications that allow users to set shopping reminders and creating electronic shopping list on their smartphones. However, manually entering the shopping reminders and shopping lists remains difficult and time consuming to users. Some online shopping sites allow users to reorder previously ordered items, and present automatic reordering suggestions based on saved shopping data when the users revisit the online shopping sites. However, such reminders are often presented at a time when the user does not have an interest in making purchases and/or does not have an opportunity to check existing inventories, resulting in reduced effectiveness of the reordering suggestions.
Today, state of the art refrigerators are network-enabled and are controllable through apps installed on smart devices, and/or through touch-screens on the front side of the refrigerators. Some of these smart refrigerators purportedly are capable of detecting the content of the refrigerator and generating refilling reminders that are displayed on the front side touch-screens. However, the accuracy of these reminders are low (e.g., due to inadequate ingredient recognition, quantity determination techniques), resulting in low consumer confidence in the reminders. The touch-screen interactions to make purchases online are also cumbersome since users do not enjoy standing in front of the refrigerator touch screen for long periods of time to do online shopping.
For at least the above reasons, there is a need for an improved restocking system for household consumables, especially for restocking refrigerators.